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Ideas are the currency of the 21st century. You can have brilliant ideas—truly revolutionary ideas—but if you cannot persuade others to act, those ideas don’t matter.

In 2006, the famous TED conference began streaming 18-minute presentations from the world’s top minds for free. Today TED talks are viewed more than two million times a day and have become the gold standard in public speaking and presentation skills. Like it or or not, your next presentation will be compared to a TED talk.

Carmine Gallo is communication coach for some of the world’s most admired brands, including Intel, Coca-Cola, Cisco, Google, Disney, and more. He writes the Forbes.com column “My Communications Coach. He’s the author of seven books, including the recent bestseller, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs.

Carmine’s latest book is Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds. Carmine studied over 500 TED talks and interviewed scores of TED speakers, as well as leading researchers in the fields of neuroscience and communication. His findings explore the art and science of persuasion and public speaking and reveal techniques that you can use immediately to radically improve your very next pitch or presentation.

In this episode, Jesse and Carmine discuss three of the nine common elements to all TED talks. Each of these elements is scientifically proven to increase the likelihood that your presentation will be successful, whether you’re pitching to one person or speaking to thousands.

1. Unleashing the master within
2. Mastering the art of storytelling
3. Having a conversation
4. Teaching something new
5. Delivering jaw-dropping moments
6. Lightening up
7. Brevity (especially following the 18-Minute Rule and the Rule of 3)
8. Painting a mental picture (favor pictures over text)
9. Staying in your lane

Bonus: The #1 habit that transforms a merely good presentation into a TED-worthy performance … practice relentlessly